Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/33

 it looked as if he had to be guilty. He protested strongly that he had written the table from memory. Finally one member of the committee turned to the boy. "You say you committed this to memory in the belief that you might get it in the examination?" "Yes," he replied, "I can commit almost anything at sight." "Do you think you could repeat the table now?" "I believe so," he said hesitatingly. It was three weeks since he had had the test, but he dropped his head for a moment and then began. "I'll read the figures across," and he did so haltingly but surely, and in the five hundred and four digits he made an error in but two. I think I shall never vote to convict any one on circumstantial evidence again.

I have had so many varying experiences with undergraduates and their escapades and irregularities that I have come often to have a sort of intuition as to what has happened as soon as I talk to the student. Two instances of this will suffice to illustrate my point. In one of the large laboratories in chemistry an instructor became suspicious that certain students were collaborating in their experiments, and were not performing all of them. It was thought that each man was doing a part of them, and that the others were working them up from his data, changing the data very slightly to avoid suspicion. I called the men and talked to each of them alone, as is my custom, before bringing them to the committee. When the committee saw them their explanations were so clear and direct as to when and how they had done their experiments that the unanimous recommendation was that the case against them be dismissed. A night intervened before I could take the recommenda-